 |
 |
|
|
Russell Weston, who is charged with shooting and killing two police officers at the United States Capitol last month, is awaiting arraignment in federal court in Washington, D.C. Because Weston was previously diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia, legal experts are predicting that his attorneys will plead an insanity defense at his trial.
According to Richard Bonnie, J.D., professor of law at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, "His disorder is the kind that is at the core of the insanity defense. His forensic evaluation will turn on questions of mental functioning at the time he was at the Capitol." Bonnie also directs the University's Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy and co-authored APA's 1985 position statement on the insanity defense.
Bonnie told Psychiatric News that "if the insanity defense fails in Weston's case, it will not be because the standard is too narrow."
He noted that the insanity defense underwent significant reform after the highly visible acquittal on grounds of insanity of John Hinckley, Jr. who attempted to assassinate former President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Because Hinckley's attorneys successfully argued that he acted not of his own volition but from an "irresistible impulse" of a diseased mind, he was confined to a mental hospital. Because of concerns by the public about his eventual release from the hospital, many states and Congress moved to restrict the insanity defense. Congress in 1984 codified the insanity defense used by the federal courts but eliminated the "irresistible impulse" test, said Bonnie.
The current federal law holds that a person who cannot appreciate the wrongfulness of his or her behavior when commiting a crime because of a mental illness or defect should not be held criminally responsible.
By the mid-1980s, most state legislatures had eliminated the volitional test from their insanity defense laws, according to Bonnie.
Also during this reform period, Congress and a majority of the states with insanity defense laws shifted the burden of proof for showing "clear and convincing evidence" from the prosecution to the defense. "I think the impact of this has been negligible, because even before the law [change], the burden of proof was on the defense because of the public's skepticism about the insanity claim," said Bonnie.
About 12 states have adopted the "guilty but mentally ill" plea as an alternative to the insanity defense. This category arose out of the difficulty many juries had in dealing with issues of factual guilt and defendants' ability to judge the morality of their actions, according to an APA fact sheet on the insanity defense.
Bonnie commented, "the alternative proved to be less significant than either proponents wanted or opponents feared."
APA developed its position statement on the insanity defense, which was approved by the Board of Trustees in 1985, without the "irresistible impulse" test and with a wrongfulness standard similar to the one adopted by Congress in 1984.
APA's statement defines mental disease and retardation as "severely abnormal mental conditions that grossly and demonstrably impair a person's perception or understanding of reality. . . ."
For more information on the insanity defense see APA's web site at www.psych.org/public--info/INSANI~1.htm.